Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Done

“Today’s a very sad day,” Senator John McCain said. What was making him sad was something many people had been waiting for a long time: the Senate, on Saturday, passed a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the law that forces gay and lesbian members of the military to lead secret lives. McCain spoke just before a vote on whether debate could end and the bill could go forward for a vote. This was the big test, because it required sixty votes—and got sixty-three—while the vote to actually pass the repeal only requires fifty. After the success of the procedural measure, a real vote was quickly scheduled for 3 P.M. Saturday, and picked up two more, passing sixty-five to thirty-one. Since it’s already made it through the House, President Obama will just have to sign, and we will be done.

Or almost done: the repeal will need more than Obama’s signature to be implemented quickly and effectively. There are a lot of warrens this could be dragged into, if the Administration doesn’t manage the process well. (TPM had some details.) There’s a certification of the Pentagon’s review of a repeal’s impact (minimal risk, it found), a sixty-day waiting period, procedures written up for each of the services. That could be easy, or it could be hard. Obama has a role in deciding which it is.

Some credit—there were six Republican votes for repeal: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, of Maine; Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska; Scott Brown, of Massachusetts; George Voinovich, of Ohio; and Mark Kirk, of Illinois, who took Obama’s old seat. (John Ensign and Richard Burr jumped in for the final tally, after voting no on the procedural.) And though it doesn’t forgive everything, Joe Lieberman, it has to be said, played a positive role in the endgame, too. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, the sole Democrat who opposed repeal, didn’t show up. Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, who thought he wouldn’t be able to come because he is being prepared for prostate-cancer surgery, did anyway, as the Times reported, and talked about love:

I don’t care who you love. . . If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.

Love is a more appropriate emotion to evoke here than sadness. But there is a sense in which McCain was not entirely wrong about that. Just before the D.A.D.T. repeal moved forward, the Dream act failed to do so. That bill would have mapped a clear path to citizenship for young people who were brought here illegally as minors, if they went to college or served in the military. As with gay and lesbian servicemen, it is a pity that such commitments to our country can’t be recognized and made use of. Why waste people who have been a part of America since they were children?

But even if one confines the discussion to the D.A.D.T. vote, there may be a grain of truth in McCain’s “sad day” remark, if not quite in the way he means. D.A.D.T. ruined lives. More than thirteen thousand service members were fired because of it. Lieutenant Dan Choi, who was one of them, has since worked hard for a repeal—so hard, in such emotionally demanding circumstances, that he was hospitalized after a breakdown this week. (Saturday morning, he told the Miami Herald’sSteve Rothaus that news of the vote gave him “a jolt of good American energy.” He’s earned it.) We have no way of counting how many more people left the military or denied their own vocation for service, or how many personal relationships were ended or soured. How many soldiers gave up on the prospect of having a family? One thing we do know, as the Pentagon freely acknowledged in its review, is that there are plenty of gay and lesbian troops in the military now. (And the study’s survey found that having worked with a gay or lesbian colleague made straight service members more likely to support repeal.) D.A.D.T. just forced them to lie about who they were, and live in fear about being found out, when their jobs were hard enough already. Why should, say, a nineteen-year-old already in a combat zone have to wake up scared about that?

So if a sad day is a day when you reckon up painful things, then maybe this would be one; but a day when you can finally begin to draw a line under that account is not sad at all. It’s time to celebrate.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.